I posted last week how stupid I thought it was for people to get up at midnight to get in line at a Best Buy, Target or at Wal-Mart. In two separate incidents, three people were killed on this insane, out of control event. At the Toys “R” Us, in Palm Desert, CA, two men opened fire on each other in this store. It was not clear if it was over the fight between both of their girlfriends. Both men killed each other. I wish I could feel sorry for them. But, I don’t. I just don’t have any sympathy for either one unless one pulled his gun in self-defense. But, what the hell are you doing bringing guns into a toy store anyway? Damn…just, DAMN.

A Wal-Mart in Long Island, NY was the scene of Wal-Mart employee Jdimytai Damour being trampled to death by a crowd of 2000 insane people. There were precautions that were taken to prevent this sort of thing by Wal-Mart management. But, apparently, they were far from adequate and not much preparation taken. There was no excuse for this. What really got me is that when the store manager announced the store was closing as a result of the death, customers angrily complained about it and some even kept shopping. Hey, the price of a human life must be going up. Damour died due to 50% off on several HDTVs! I think it’s safe to say there will be one helluva lawsuit over this and rightfully so. Police are looking at store videos to determine if they can tell who stepped on the Wal-Mart employee. I doubt they will be able to find anything that they could take to court. Some will say they were pushed into Damour.

This had to happen eventually. It’s probably happened in the past. I don’t know. My solution, short of outlawing Black Friday, is to stagger the prices over a series of days. Instead of having all items on sale on one day, why not spread it out over 4 or 5 days, call it Black Week or whatever. As it stands now, people feel they have to get the sale discounts in one day or they lose it. That is the impetus for so many people showing up 5AM at Wal-Mart. Short of doing that, I would put 25-50% of the sales at their online web sites, call centers can take orders by phone. I’m not sure how well the latter would work. Phone lines would be jammed and web sites would probably crash. There has to be a way to have people get item ticket numbers a head of time and a series of numbers taken on one particular day. There has to be a better way of handling this. The Wal-Mart employee’s death could have been avoided is my main point in this post. There was simply no excuse for that to ever happen. Someone with the IQ of a cucumber could have come up with better safety precautions than the management team did at the Long Island Wal-Mart.